Thursday, August 14, 2008

Concurrency in software is difficult. However, much of this difficulty is a consequence of the abstractions for concurrency that we have chosen to use. The dominant one in use today for general purpose computing is threads. But non-trivial multi-threaded programs are incomprehensible to humans.

Lee argues that threads are wildly nondeterministic by default, while "nondeterminism should be judiciously and carefully introduced where needed, and should be explicit in programs."